The Future Of IPG; Social Commerce Analyzed

The Wall Street Journal has learned that Elliott Management, an activist hedge fund, is pushing for board seats at Interpublic Group (IPG). Elliott owns a 6.7% stake in the advertising holding company and purportedly wants IPG to sell soon. Investors had pinned Publicis as a potential IPG buyer, but that seems unlikely after Publicis’ acquisition of Sapient. “Publicis—while not impossible that they might do something at some point in the future—is pretty clear in putting forward it’s not going to do anything anytime soon,” Pivotal Research analyst Brian Wieser told The Wall Street Journal. More.

Social Commerce Swells

Research from BI Intelligence details how social media is impacting the path to purchase. The findings suggest that the volume of social commerce is growing, and sales from social commerce grew three times the rate of overall ecommerce. Due to its sheer size, Facebook is the leading platform for social commerce referrals and sales, followed by Twitter and Pinterest. The research suggests conversion rates will improve as Twitter and Facebook cement their buy buttons. Read it. Pair with AdExchanger’s “The Buy Button Buy-In.”

Dynamic Dish

Dish network is moving forward with plans to include dynamic ad insertion in its forthcoming digital TV service, Ad Age reports, despite some minor snags. "I think the advertising piece of OTT is materially higher than it is in linear TV,” Dish Chairman Charlie Ergen said, “where in the advent of DVRs … people do skip commercials and so rather than fight the rhythm and swim upstream with that, we'd rather come up with a different dynamic that attacks it in a different way.” With its data, Dish claims it will soon be able to stream personalized ads to every viewer. “We can start moving into some of the categories that the Facebooks and the Googles of the world are taking advantage of today,” Ergen added.

Rocky Mobile Road

Online coupon aggregator RetailMeNot had a rocky third quarter, namely due to mobile growing pains and the departure of its CFO. RetailMeNot’s mobile traffic has soared. It represented almost 40% of total traffic this quarter. But during the company’s Q3 earnings call this week, CEO Cotter Cunningham said mobile monetization has not kept up. “In many cases, we don’t believe we’re getting full credit for the true value we’re driving,” said Cunningham. Read the earnings release. And more in The Street. The mobile cookie: not yet baked.

Facebook Ads Made Easy

Red Hot Labs released a tool called Toro to facilitate how app and game developers buy Facebook ads. According to the San Francisco-based startup, Toro cuts the cost of locking in a mobile user by 40%. “Toro has been an invaluable asset as we grow our audience across mobile,” said Vivek Patel, co-founder of Sosh, an events discovery app and early adopter of Toro. “In Toro, we found a product that is fast, insanely simple to use and yet powerful enough to give us all the metrics we need to drive mobile performance campaigns.” Read more via VentureBeat.